New Hampshire Recount --- Is There Still Evidence of Fraud?

The Nader requested New Hampshire recount is apparently not showing any changes in the vote tally. It seems as if they are doing a hand-count, though it doesn't say for sure. But they mention catching errors in the optical scan ballots that the machine doesn't read.

What seems to have happened is in a few NH precincts, the Kerry vote was way off from the Gore vote in 2000. In one case, there was a 20% swing. But the recount seems to be saying these were legitimate swings-- which is interesting and weird but nothing fraudulent.

However, the other thing is that New Hampshire was where the exit polls were WAY off.

According to exit poll data that I got from Democratic Underground, the final Kerry vote was off from the exit poll number by almost 5%, which was over twice the margin of error for the exit poll.

So, there are two possibilities here.

One, is that the exit polls were fundamentally wrong, and there was no vote fraud, or

Two, there was vote fraud that led to the exit poll discrepency, but it was in other NH precincts than the ones they did recounts on.

Unfortunately, since they didn't find any real changes in those 11 precincts, they probably won't count the rest of the state, and we'll probably never know.

What would be nice is if the exit pollers would release their data-- do they have exit poll data for the recounted precicnts and if so did it match the vote tally? If it did match, then that would support the idea that the exit poll was accurate and there was fraud elsewhere. If it didn't match, then it would show the exit polls were off for some apparent reason.

NH uses about 80% optical scan machine, and 20% punch cards.

If we assume there WAS vote fraud that helped to put Bush over the top, it probably wasn't anything really obvious like those weird swings in the 11 NH precincts. It was probably skimming Kerry votes at a certain frequency in direct record electronic (DRE) voting machines (the kind where you can't recount)-- at such a low level you might never see it by statistics.

In fact, there is some evidence for this sort of fraud, in that scores of voters reported that their Kerry votes kept switching to a Bush vote. Of 89 incidences where there were problems with these machines and the votes not going to the right place, 86 were votes for Kerry that switched to Bush. That's VERY suspicious, and you have to wonder how many thousands of times this happened all over the country without people knowing?

Between this sort of apparent cheating and the clear irregularities and vote suppression in Ohio, this could easily give Bush his overall edge.